Monday, 15 April 2013

Get Marching!

There comes a time when you have to get marching and in West
London that’s going to happen on Saturday 27th April, in defence of
the Accident and Emergency Department at Ealing Hospital.

UHands
Off !

h

We built it

We Paid for it

It’s Our NHS.

There are two starting points – Southall Park at 1130 am and
Acton at 1230pm. Both to end on Ealing Common, but the Southall march will
pause at Ealing Hospital on the way. These marches are supported by the local
Council, the Trades Unions, Trades Councils and local religious and community
groups. It is likely to be a well-attended and very bright march – this part of
the world doesn’t like to be pushed around.

It’s got the Acting Chief Executive in a right tizz, he’s
written to the local press to deny that any department of the Hospital will
shut during the next three years and pleading that patients should continue to
attend rather than go to rival local hospitals.

Well, Ealing is at real threat, when it lost its stroke unit
campaigners knew that would harm services and lead to further closures. We’ve
been told that not only is it losing it’s A and E but other departments too –
including maternity. If that goes, Gynaecology won’t be there long either.

There is a real danger that, if patients go elsewhere, the
fall off will hit Ealing’s finances and justify further closures. It’s the same
as the way railways shut lines by making them so difficult to use that
passenger numbers fell away. Then they were able to justify closure due to
‘lack of demand’.

Local campaigners want people to go on attending Ealing, but
don’t trust the Chief Executive or the health Service over closures, and
rightly so.

Developers are eyeing up the land for building, right now.
That land is valuable – next door was once ‘St Bernards' a Victorian ‘asylum’
in spacious pleasure gardens, then a well-respected psychiatric hospital and
now a housing estate.